IP Probes

In order to get the end-to-end network performance data, we should install probes to the infrastructure. Probes are the most effective way to reach the end-to-end performance that is perceived by the end user. An alternative approach is to correlate multiple node-to-node performance data to reach the end-to-end performance metrics. This is very hard to maintain and may cause misleading results so we should always use probes where possible.

There are two types of probes. Active and Passive.

Passive probes passively monitor the packets that are passed through them. Basically in the entrance point, they monitor the packet header to identify the source address, destination address and some other information. The remote probe at the exit point does the same. Both probes send this information along with the timestamps to the management system where they are correlated and converted to performance metrics. Passive probing is a costly solution. Its’ main benefit is, they do not generate any traffic so maximum throughput is maintained.

Active Probes, on the other hand, generate special traffic between each other to measure the end-to-end performance. Some probe vendors use ICMP PDUs for this purpose. Other vendors, such as Cisco, prefer to send special PDUs that have additional parameters. Active Probes are cost effective when compared to the passive ones. They should be the preferred approach to measure IP based traffic.

Probes can be external (hardware based) or internal (software based). Software based probes are easier to deploy and maintain. Most popular software based internal probes are Cisco SAA probes (IP SLA).

Probes provide granular data. Typically this data is collected and further aggregated by the performance management systems and forwarded to other systems such as SQM.